Journal of Personality最新文献

Objective: Examining the personality and well-being correlates of positive event diversity.

Background: Past research has highlighted that personality traits are linked to the frequency of daily positive events. This study is the first to examine positive event diversity, the extent to which positive events are spread across multiple types of positive life domains, as well as its personality and well-being correlates.

Method: We conducted parallel analyses of three daily diary datasets (Ns = 1919, 744, and 1392) that included evening assessment of daily positive events and affective well-being. The Big Five personality traits were assessed in baseline surveys.

Results: Positive Event Diversity was related to higher person-mean daily positive affect but not negative affect. Higher Extraversion, Agreeableness, Openness, and lower Neuroticism were correlated with more positive event diversity. These associations became nonsignificant when controlling for positive event frequency. Positive event frequency moderated the link between positive event diversity and person-mean affect, such that higher positive event diversity was associated with higher negative and lower positive affect for people who experienced more frequent positive events.

Conclusions: No consistent evidence was found for personality as a moderator of the positive event diversity-well-being link across the three studies. Further, the well-being implications of positive event diversity may be better understood when interpreting them alongside indexes of positive event frequency.

Objective: People value solitude in varying degrees. Theories and studies suggest that people's appreciation of solitude varies considerably across persons (e.g., an introverted person may value solitude more than an extraverted person), and solitude experiences (i.e., on average, people may value some functions of solitude, e.g., privacy, more than other functions, e.g., self-discovery). What are the unique contributions of these two sources?

Method: We surveyed a quota-based sample of 501 US residents about their perceived importance of a diverse set of 22 solitude functions.

Results: Variance component analysis reveals that both sources contributed to the variability of perceived importance of solitude (person: 22%; solitude function: 15%). Crucially, individual idiosyncratic preferences (person-by-solitude function interaction) had a substantial impact (46%). Further analyses explored the role of personality traits, showing that different functions of solitude hold varying importance for different people. For example, neurotic individuals prioritize emotion regulation, introverted individuals value relaxation, and conscientious individuals find solitude important for productivity.

Conclusions: People value solitude for idiosyncratic reasons. Scientific inquiries on solitude must consider the fit between a person's characteristics and the specific functions a solitary experience affords. This research suggests that crafting or enhancing positive solitude experiences requires a personalized approach.

Objective: Further investigate the application of self-determination theory (SDT) to experiences of solitude by examining the effects of recalling intrinsic versus non-intrinsic memories.

Background: SDT research indicates that recalling memories associated with intrinsic goals (e.g., personal growth, relationships, altruism) enhances present moment wellness by satisfying basic psychological needs.

Method: Two studies were conducted with American adults. Study 1 included 465 participants (age = 49.49 [SD = 19.01], 49.46% female) and Study 2 comprised 490 participants (age = 54.16 [SD = 18.89], 51.84% female). Both studies assessed the impact of recalling intrinsic versus non-intrinsic memories prior to a five-minute solitude session.

Results: Study 1 found intrinsic memories were linked to more basic psychological need satisfaction than non-intrinsic memories, but both memory types resulted in similar wellness improvements. Contrary to expectations, Study 2 revealed extrinsic memories (e.g., wealth, fame, image) led to the highest basic psychological need satisfaction and least need frustration compared to intrinsic and neutral memories, with all memory conditions showing similar wellness gains.

Conclusions: Solitude appears beneficial regardless of memory content. While different memories vary in need satisfying quality, this does not seem to impact the benefits of solitude. These findings suggest further exploration is needed before developing a "solitude skill set" for use during inevitable periods of solitude.

Introduction: Research on the link between affect and creativity rests on the assumption that creativity unfolds as a stimulus-driven response to affective states. We challenge this assumption and examine whether personality dynamics moderate the relationships between positive and negative mood with creativity.

Theoretical model: According to our model, personality dynamics that generate and maintain positive affect and downregulate negative affect energize creativity. Based on this model, we expect high creativity in response to negative mood if people engage in self-motivation and achieve a reduction in negative mood. We further derive that individual differences in action versus state orientation moderate the within-person relationship between mood and creativity.

Method: We conducted an experience-sampling study and examined the relationship between mood and creativity in everyday work-life. Two hundred and ten participants indicated their action-state orientation and reported their mood three times a day over five consecutive workdays. At noon of each day, we assessed self-motivation and in the evening the extent to which participants had generated novel and useful ideas during the day.

Results: We observed high creativity when negative mood declined and self-motivation was high. Action-state orientation moderated the within-person relationships of positive and negative mood with creativity.

Conclusion: Personality dynamics determine whether positive and negative mood result in creativity.

Objective: Despite long-standing assumptions that a sense of purpose in life and goal pursuit are mutually supportive, empirical evidence of their reciprocity remains deficient. In the context of a unique out-of-school time program that empowers youth to pursue passions through self-driven learning, we examined whether purpose and one aspect of goal pursuit-perceptions of goal progress-work together to sustain themselves and each other over time.

Method: Adolescents (N = 321) completed daily surveys throughout program enrollment (M_enrollment  = 69.09 days). Through dynamic structural equation modeling, we derived within-person patterns of day-to-day prediction as well as individual differences in these patterns.

Results: We found purpose and perceived goal progress exhibited significant daily inertia (i.e., autoregressive prediction) and reciprocity (i.e., cross-lagged prediction) at the within-person level. We also found initial evidence suggesting (a) tighter reciprocity was related to greater perceived goal progress overall and (b) people with greater purpose inertia may rely less on making goal progress to sustain momentum.

Conclusions: With evidence of daily purpose-progress reciprocity, the field can look forward to replicating this work in other contexts, diving deeper into interesting patterns of within-person dynamics, and developing interventions to support youth striving.

Objective: The aim of this work was to better understand the role of personality as it relates to psychopathology, with satisfaction as a mediating variable.

Background: Personality is an important determinant of many life outcomes including relationship satisfaction and psychopathology. Previous work has demonstrated that broad domains of normal personality have low-to-moderate associations with various forms of psychopathology. Research has primarily focused on mechanisms that might explain how common personality traits put one at risk for common forms of psychopathology; this work builds upon existing work in examining relationship satisfaction as one possible mechanism. No study to date has examined whether relationship satisfaction mediates the connection between personality and psychopathology.

Method: We utilized multilevel modeling in a longitudinal sample of 100 newlywed couples to test the hypothesis that major domains of personality (positive temperament, negative temperament, disinhibition) have a significant effect on relationship satisfaction which, in turn, is significantly associated with internalizing and externalizing forms of psychopathology.

Results: We found no evidence for the mediating role of relationship satisfaction; however, in exploratory analyses, we did find evidence for both between-person and within-person effects of personality on psychopathology.

Conclusions: This study confirms the role of personality as an important factor in consideration of dyadic processes, though not entirely deterministic for downstream functioning. Thus, separate factors in addition to personality may be worth examining in consideration of how low relationship satisfaction may be associated with psychopathology.

Introduction: How people attach value to the outcomes of self and other—social preferences—is central to social behavior. Recently, how dispositional and state emotion shape such social preferences has received researchers' attention.Method: The present investigation asked whether and to what extent dispositional and state compassion predict shifts in social preferences across 4 samples: two correlational samples (final ns 153 & 368, study 1a and 1b) and two experimental samples (final ns: 430 & 530, studies 2 and 3).Results: In keeping with recent accounts of compassion, dispositional compassion predicted general preference for equality, expressed as dispreference for both monetary advantage over another (interaction βs = −0.36, −0.33, −0.25, −0.22; all p < 0.001) and monetary disadvantage relative to others (βs: 0.26, 0.27, 0.28, 0.17; all p < 0.01; positive coefficients imply dispreference). This dispositional effect persisted when controlling for prosociality, positivity, agreeableness, and respectfulness. Furthermore, these dispositional compassion effects were relatively unchanged by experimental emotion inductions in studies 3 and 4. The experimental inductions of state compassion and state pride showed little evidence of systematic effects on social preferences relative to each other or a neutral condition.Discussion: Discussion focused on individual differences in emotion and social preferences.

Objective: This study explored how belief in a just world (BJW) develops among Chinese adolescents and the predictive role of family factors.

Background: The development of BJW in adolescence is an important but understudied topic, especially in non-Western contexts.

Method: Using a three-wave longitudinal design, 1525 participants (48% girls; M_age  = 12.47) were recruited to report their BJW, childhood SES, only-child or not, and parental psychological control in Wave 1 (Wave 2: N = 1262; Wave 3: N = 1124).

Results: The mean slope for personal BJW is positive and significant, but not significant for general BJW. Childhood SES predicted initial level of personal and general BJW and the rate of growth of personal BJW. Only-child predicted initial level and the growth rate of personal BJW. Parental psychological control negatively predicted personal and general BJW at three time points.

Conclusion: Personal BJW increased during the observation period, whereas general BJW was stable. Individuals with lower levels of childhood SES had lower initial personal and general BJW but a higher growth rate in personal BJW than those with higher SES. Individuals having siblings had lower levels of initial personal BJW but a higher growth rate in personal BJW than those from only-child family. Parental psychological control may exert consistent and contemporaneous negative effect on BJW across time.